Western Digital's emphasis
on recent product releases has been the consumer oriented GreenPower
family of products.
That all changed last month with the release of the Caviar SE16 320GB drives featuring
their new 320GB per-platter technology. We previewed
this drive and came away impressed by its excellent thermals, power management,
and acoustics but depressed by performance that was not any better than previous
generation drives featuring 166GB~200GB per-platter designs. We have an answer
to our performance-induced depression but that will have to wait for page
two.

The second drive from WD to utilize their new 320GB
per-platter technology is the Caviar SE16 640GB WD6400AAKS.
This areal density places WD once again in competition with Samsung's F1 lineup
featuring 334GB per-platter sizes with similar thermal, acoustic, and power
envelope specifications. However, Western Digital decided to branch off in a
new direction with a 640GB capacity instead of sticking with the tried and true
500GB and 750GB offerings from their competitors.

While the
WD 640GB drive does not fit in with the industry-standard capacity sizes, we
fully understand Western Digital's rationale behind this move. This allows WD
to use economies of scale with their new 320GB per-platter design and allows a
natural progression up to the 1TB~1.3TB level by simply increasing platter
count for each logical step. Of course, unless you use sub-prime mortgage mathematics,
three 320GB platters only equals 960GB of capacity. WD engineering told us they
can easily stretch the areal density of the current platter design to get to
the magical 1TB capacity to match their competitors and witness the marketing
group smiling (Editors Note - anyone in engineering knows just how
difficult that can be).

Why
Samsung did not follow this pattern and introduce a 668GB drive with two
platters and four heads is beyond us (Editor - Samsung will introduce
a 640GB model listed as the HD642JJ in the "near" future)
as their 750GB drive is essentially the same drive as their 1TB offering featuring
three platters and six heads, just with 252GB left that could easily be filled
with family pictures or Flight Simulator X. Update
3/22/08 - Several readers have questioned the actual platter density size on
the Samsung F1 HD753LJ. Samsung's latest product information to us had
indicated 334GB per-platter technology is being utilized on this drive.
However, since Samsung's website seems to offer differing information with the
latest PDF specification file listing "Max 334GB Formatted Capacity per
Disk", we have asked for clarification. Hopefully, we will have an answer
shortly.

However, no matter what marketing decision Samsung
made in regards to the "my drive is bigger than your drive
terminology", the simple fact is that their new F1 product offers
seriously fast performance for the dollar. Speaking of dollars, the Samsung
750GB will set you back $139.99 and the WD 640GB about $129.99 as of today at
Newegg. For the bean counters
out there, that equates to around 18.6 cents per gigabyte for the Samsung drive
and 20.3 cents per gigabyte for the WD drive.

Our review samples
arrived from WD just a few hours ago, so naturally we were curious to see how
well this drive performed against recent arrivals from Samsung. After seeing
the initial results, we thought it would be prudent to post early test results
with this drive and provide a short synopsis of our experiences to date with
Western Digital's latest product. We still do not have any new information on
the Raptor product family. However, we will finally have new products from
Seagate and Hitachi next week so we can finally complete this midrange
roundup.

Let's take a quick look at a few key benchmarks and
see how this drive compares to the Samsung F1 HD753LJ.

I'm leaning towards the Samsungs (750) right now unless someone can convince me otherwise. It's a lot cheaper, has more space, and is only marginally slower on most test, but is faster on a couple tests (where its 32MB cache shines).

I can tell you during my networking hardware testing I installed one of these drives with Ubuntu and vsftpd. With tweaked network network settings (not jumbo frames though as I recall) I could transfer large files (linux distro CD) in just over 109MBytes/sec.